Researchers from Leicester and Wales have shed new light on the origins of bluestones at Stonehenge- long believed to have come from ‘sacred hills’ in Wales.

Geologists from the National Museum Wales, University of Leicester and Aberystwyth University, have uncovered new evidence of its origins – which brings into question how the rocks were brought to the Salisbury Plain.

One type of bluestone at Stonehenge, the so-called ‘spotted dolerite’, was convincingly traced to the Mynydd Preseli area in north Pembrokeshire in the early 1920s. However, the sources of the other bluestones – chiefly rhyolites (a type of rock) and the rare sandstones remained, until recently, unknown.